Embodiments of the present invention relate to an optical apparatus to capture multiples images of a wide-angle scene with multiples cameras having different imaging parameters. In existing systems, to create stereoscopic vision for a human observer, multiple identical cameras having identical lenses are used to capture the scene from several viewpoints and simulate the parallax view created by the distance from the human eyes. However, this perfect symmetry of both eyes is not representative of real human eyes, where one eye often has different imaging capabilities or defects than the other and one eye is more important because it has ocular dominance over the other when observing a scene. The present invention uses a combination of hardware cameras with different imaging parameters combined with software processing to optimally use the information from the multiples cameras with different parameters and present the optimal views to the user.
Existing stereoscopic vision system use two or more identical cameras generally having lenses with narrow angle FoV to image the scene and create stereographic views for an observer. There are some advantages to use identical cameras to observe in stereoscopy the scene, including direct compatibilities with display devices without further image processing. However, by using identical cameras, a lot of information is captured in double by the cameras just to create the geometrical difference in the images due to parallax. More useful information could be captured if different cameras instead of identical cameras were used in combination to image processing.
Some existing stereoscopic imaging system use identical wide-angle lenses to observe the scene and allow capturing more field of view than what is viewed by a user at a specific time, allowing the user to modify the display area inside the full field of view of the wide-angle lenses. However, even if these lenses have a good parallax vision based on their separation when looking in a central direction, these wide-angle lenses loose 3D vision when looking in the direction of the axis between the cameras because no more parallax information is present.
In existing stereoscopic vision systems, there are various challenges to offer a comfortable vision to a human observer considering that the ideal display parameters vary from one human observer to the other. The discomfort to users can be removed by further image processing to better calibrate the two displayed images to the user and mimic perfectly the human vision.